NSA asked judge to delete 'classified' testimony without public awareness

The National Security Agency worked behind the scenes to remove a section of a court transcript after suspecting one of its lawyers inadvertently disclosed secret information in a court case over alleged illegal surveillance.

Has the wall of secrecy
protecting US intelligence-gathering methods become so severe and
repressive that even to acknowledge the redaction of sensitive
information from public documents is now thought to be revealing
too much?

It seems the United
States may be heading in that dark direction following a recent
session of the Jewel v. NSA case, in which the Electronic
Frontier Foundation (EFF) is challenging the NSA’s power to
monitor foreign citizens’ US-based communications and social
media accounts.

In the course of the
ongoing case, which has gained public attention in light of the
Snowden revelations, the government told US District Judge
Jeffrey White that one of its lawyers may have accidentally
spilled the beans on sensitive information, the Daily Caller
reported.

US authorities wrote a letter to Judge White asking him to remove
in camera the classified information from the transcripts,
without notifying the public to the change. White not only
ignored the government’s request to delete portions of the
transcript, but informed the plaintiffs’ attorneys of the
government’s request, allowing them to respond in kind.

“We rightly considered this an outrageous request and
vigorously opposed it,” senior staff attorney for the EFF
David Greene said in a statement. “The public has a First
Amendment right not only to attend the hearing but to have an
accurate transcript of it. Moreover, the federal law governing
court reporting requires that ‘each session of the court’ be
‘recorded verbatim’ and that the transcript be certified by the
court reporter as ‘a correct statement of the testimony taken and
the proceedings had.’”

Greene slammed the government’s request to permanently remove
from the court record what it deemed to be classified
information, without so much as even showing that something has
been redacted (blackened out) in the documents.

“We…argued that under no circumstances should the government
be able to ‘remove’ anything from the transcript without
indicating that something has in fact been removed, a process
commonly called ‘redaction,’ not ‘removal,’ the term used in the
government’s request.”

The plaintiff’s lawyer also asked the court to make all papers
filed about this dispute immediately available.

Judge White agreed to let government officials examine the
transcript, but warned he would “hold [it] to a very high
standard and would not allow [it] to manufacture a misleading
transcript by hiding the fact of any redactions.”

Upon inspection of the transcript, US authorities realized its
legal team had not accidentally gave away sensitive information,
and withdrew its request. However, EFF said the incident points
to the dangers of allowing the government to tamper with
documents without any public oversight.

“The incident speaks volumes about the dangers of allowing
the government free rein to claim secrecy in court proceedings
and otherwise,” the EFF said.

It has also been revealed that Judge White demanded the NSA to
stop deleting evidence relevant to the case on three separate
occasions. After the third attempt, the NSA said its computers
were simply “too complicated” to prevent the deletions
from occurring. Upholding national security was also cited as a
reason for deleting data.

“The government’s attempt to change this history was
unprecedented,” Greene wrote about this week’s actions.
“We could find no example of where...such a request had been
made. This was another example of the government’s attempt to
shroud in secrecy both its own actions, as well as the challenges
to those actions.”